Quote Originally Posted by KleeneOnigiri View Post
That's my guess, I don't know if that was the reason or not. It's a background. So when would you count something as a background? When not?
Also, in backgrounds you could also accidentally have something in there that the contest organizers didn't notice. And they already had enough to do just figuring out who stole images and who ripped off stuff.

Rip offs were taken out, as you can see that they removed no 12 in the female section.
If you can prove that the other things are rip offs (aka not only used as a reference but being too similar or even being traced), SE will probably remove those too. But you have to prove it.

Edit: Well, maybe it's not the background then.

But the "too long" is a rule for this competition. Doesn't matter if there are long hairs ingame already.

And if you look at the template, the hair would be outside of the picture.

Personally, I would have loved to see very long hair But rules are rules.
It's not the background in the male hairstyle. In-game shots are allowed, and there are "finalists" with plenty of in-game clutter in the background (some with much worse noise than the one you're referring to).

It's also not the hair length on the female hairstyle, as there are several finalists with styles as long or longer.

We're simply voting on a selection that was preferred by some mystery selector(s). Clearly they have an aesthetic preference that doesn't include many of the styles in this thread, and in the end that's all that really counted. This was never really about what the community wanted the most. Let's not try to rationalize the ridiculousness of it all away.